The latest Firefox comes with a new browser console, useful to add-on developers

Sep 17, 2013 17:31 GMT  ·  By

Web developers may have a bit more to be excited about in the new Firefox 24, which has just landed in the stable channel and is making its way through the automated update system. While regular users will be hard-pressed to spot the new features in the latest Firefox, developers may notice the new Browser Console.

Granted, "new" is a relative term since what's now called the Browser Console is simply an evolution of the old error console, which has now been disabled, and borrows heavily from the existing Web Console, which has been part of the dev tools since times immemorial, when Firefox 4 was still new.

However, there is one crucial difference, whereas the Web Console's scope is limited to the tab it's associated with, the Browser Console can access all the tabs as well as the UI layer. The tool is more useful to extension and add-on developers or Firefox developers outright than to web devs working on a site or app.

Firefox 24 was supposed to be the release that brought support, at least partial support, for the Web Audio API, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Instead, the latest update comes with a new resampler option for WebRTC which greatly simplifies the internal implementation of the web communication standard.

Firefox now uses a Speex resampler which eliminates the need to use an awkward 44000 Hz sample rate, rather than the standard 44100 Hz, which is then upscaled to 44100 Hz.

"The webrtc.org code has a fixed-ratios resampler used for input->codec resampling (48000->16000 for example). This resampler doesn't support 44100 hz directly due to it requiring larger interpolation/decimation ratios than they were willing to code. Instead, the code lies and says 44100Hz is 44000Hz, which allows 11-to-2/4/8 resampling ratios," Mozilla explained the problem.

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